Time to Up Your Fiber Intake: 4 Benefits You Never Realized

Although fiber is most well-known for keeping your digestive system rolling smooth, the benefits don’t stop there! Additional benefits include:

• Slows stomach emptying: This suppresses a hormone called ghrelin — a hormones that triggers hunger — resulting in you maintaining a sense of fullness for longer
• Balances blood sugar: Fiber is a non-digestible carbohydrate, meaning it slows down the breakdown of foods into glucose. Balanced blood sugar not only means fewer high blood sugar levels (hyperglycemia) but also fewer lows (hypoglycmeia)
• Lower LDL (bad) cholesterol: Since fiber is not broken down in the intestine, a specific type of fiber, called soluble fiber (well get more into this) can bind to LDL cholesterol and remove it from the body. In addition, this study found that an intake of 30 grams or more per day may be helpful in increasing your HDL (good) cholesterol
• Promotes healthy gut microbiome: Did you know that fiber is the food for our gut microbiome?! Without not only enough fiber, but a variety of different fiberous foods, our microbes will not have sufficient nutrients to thrive, resulting in “a loss of species reliant on these substrates”. This disruption could lead to a host of diseases. In fact, long-term studies consistently show an inverse relationship between dietary fiber intake and all-cause mortality!

5 Strategies to Optimize Your Cholesterol

You may be thinking or have even been told, “Cholesterol is a type of lipid, so to lower cholesterol levels you need to cut back on fatty foods.” This is not necessarily the case. In fact, the opposite may be true.

In 2014, a meta-analysis of 72 studies and over 600,000 participants investigated the impact of fatty acid consumption on cardiovascular disease. The investigators concluded that saturated fat intake was not associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease (CHD). However, this was not the case for trans-fat, the most harmful type of fat shown to stimulate abnormal cholesterol levels and promote full-body inflammation.